Bridget Jones Award 2025: La Vaughan Belle
La Vaughn Belle is a visual artist based in the US Virgin Islands, a place that has changed hands seven times- the longest being Denmark (250 years) and the last the United States (since 1917). Her work uses counter archival practices as a decolonial tool. She employs the silences and fragments of the material culture and archives to create layered narratives that challenge colonial hierarchies and nostalgia.
We were delighted to welcome La Vaughan Belle to the 48th Annual Society for Caribbean Studies Conference where she gave a presentation entitled ‘How to Survive Colonial Nostalgia’.
Working in a variety of disciplines her practice includes: painting, installation, photography, writing, video and public interventions. Her work with colonial era pottery led to a commission with the renowned brand of porcelain products, the Royal Copenhagen. She has exhibited her work in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe in institutions such as the Museo del Barrio (NY), Casa de las Americas (Cuba), the Museum of the African Diaspora (CA) and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (DK) with large solo exhibitions at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (SC) and the National Nordic Museum (WA). Her art is in the collections of the National Photography Museum and the Vestsjælland Museum in Denmark and the National Gallery of Art and the Virgina Fine Art Museum in the U.S. She is the co-creator of I Am Queen Mary, the artist-led groundbreaking monument that confronted the Danish colonial amnesia while commemorating the legacies of resistance of the African people who were brought to the former Danish West Indies. The project was featured in over 100 media outlets around the world including the NY Times, Politiken, VICE, the BBC and Le Monde. Her work has also been written about in Hyperallergic, Artforum, Small Axe and numerous journals and books.
To find out more about La Vaughan’s work, please visit her website: https://www.lavaughnbelle.com/